"But it comes with a troubling idea of what literature is today: a salve for the distracted mind; a groove along which thoughts disordered by the bad habits of centripetal reading might fall back into line."

"I had always considered my thoughts as something abstract, but they weren't; they were as material as the heart beating in my chest. The same was true of the mind, the soul, the personality; all of it was fixed in the cells and originated as a result of the various ways in which these cells reac...

"Then there's the risible campaign commercial in which the Tailgunner dresses up in camo and face paint and hangs out in the blind with the Duck Dynasty crew, looking like a G.I. Joe who's lost his kung-fu grip on his senses."

"We begin to esteem this way of being at its true worth when we realize that the creators of the brain food that we're wolfing down are at least as involved in it, at the level of imagination, as we are."